GNOME 3

Summary

Owner

Current status

GNOME has been mostly updated to 2.31.5 in rawhide.
dconf, gnome-icon-theme-symbolic, gtk3 and yelp-xsl are in rawhide.
The dbus a11y stack is now the default.
gtk3 modules have been added for at-spi2-atk, PackageKit and gtk3-engines.

Detailed Description

GNOME 3 is the next major version of the GNOME desktop. After many years of a largely unchanged GNOME 2.x experience, GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with gnome-shell. There are also many changes under the surfaces, like the move from CORBA-based technologies such as GConf, Bonobo, at-spi to dbus-based successors.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora stays in sync with upstream, and gains a new user experience. Some long-standing problems with the CORBA-based accessibility stack will hopefully be solved as a side-effect of the move to D-Bus

Implement data migration for applications that are ported from GConf2 to dconf

done for evince

done for gedit

done for brasero

done for gnome-bluetooth

done for nautilus-sendto

done for gnome-color-manager

done for gnome-packagekit

done for gnome-power-manager

Implement fallback from the shell to 'classical GNOME' for unsupported hardware

All system status indicators must use symbolic icons, others are optional

power (Done)

updates (Done)

network

keyboard

sound

bluetooth

Make sure applications keep working and don't run into mixed linkage against both gtk2 and gtk3 via gtk-using libraries. Currently known problems:

rhythmbox (uses gtk2, but needs libbrasero-burn/media and gnome-media-profiles, which have moved to gtk3)

gthumb (uses gtk2, but needs libbrasero-burn which has moved to gtk3)

solang (uses gtk2, but needs libbrasero-burn/media which has moved to gtk3)

gnomeradio, nautilus-sound-converter also use gnome-media-profiles

Current mixed linkage problems that need to be addressed:

gnome-volume-control-applet

How To Test

How to test the accessibility stack:

. Make sure accessibility support is turned on

. Install at-spi2-core, at-spi2-atk, pyatspi

. Set the GConf key /desktop/gnome/interface/at-spi-corba to false

. Log in again

. Verify that at-spi-registry is not running

. Start orca

. Verify that at-spi-registryd2 has been activated

. Verify that speech support in orca works as it does with the old stack

Repeat these steps with other accessibility technologies

How to test fallback:

. Use a system with supported graphics card

. Log in to a GNOME session

. Verify that you end up with gnome-shell

. Switch to a system with a graphics card on which we don't have 3d support (e.g. a VM)

. Log in to a GNOME session again

. Verify that you end up with the 'classic GNOME' desktop

User Experience

The user experience (on supported hardware) will be defined by gnome-shell.

Accessibility tools will work as well as (or hopefully better than) they used to. The onscreen keyboard will no longer be gok, but caribou, which may offer a slightly different user experience.

Dependencies

gnome-shell uses clutter, which relies on 3D hardware and drivers. In F13, the shell is known to work ok with Intel and ATI graphics, and work somewhat with the nouveau driver for NVidia graphics. For F14, we want the shell to work well with all three of

xorg-x11-drv-ati

xorg-x11-drv-intel

xorg-x11-drv-nouveau

Any packages that install modules for gtk2 (such as image loaders, input methods or theme engines) need to do extra work to make their functionality available to gtk3 too

Contingency Plan

If gnome-shell is not complete or stable enough, keep it experimental and stay with
'classical GNOME' as the default. Users will still be able to try the shell manually, just like in F12 and F13.

If the dbus-based accessibility stack is not sufficiently functional, we switch back to the CORBA-based stack.

Applications can be ported from GConf to dconf and from gtk2 to gtk3 one-by-one, so if the porting work is not complete (and it is very unlikely that it will be), we can just ship with some applications using the new technology, while others still use the old one.